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| An Artistic Exchange |
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 Matisse wanted to express an affirmative vision of the world… Picasso dared to question everything. Matisse was generous… Picasso had a flair for the new, the unexpected. Matisse intensified the interplay of color, while Picasso’s revolt was aimed at structure and form. Their polarity was mutually invigorating… they needed each other as a permanent challenge.--FranÁoise Gilot KERA: How did Picasso and Matisse differ in respect to the making of art? Rick Brettell: I think that Picasso makes works of art out of a kind of eruptive, emotional need, and that Matisse is much more involved in thinking about the function and structure and necessity of the work of art, its relationship to other works of art in that tradition, in that mode, and even to his own works of art. For Matisse, it’s more of a game in which he is the chess master, whereas Picasso has a kind of tumultuous relationship to the production of art. Yve-Alain Bois: Matisse works with continuity and fusion, and Picasso works with discontinuity and articulation, and I think that's because they have two different things to say, or two different things that they think art should do with regard to the beholder. Matisse wants to communicate an effect that cannot be put into words very easily. He wants to overwhelm us with complex sensory stimuli. Matisse alluded to music very often in that way, as something that cannot be put into words or represented by fragments of reality very easily, as something that touches our senses in many different ways. Picasso, on the other hand, is interested in ping-ponging moments where things change, where things become the opposite of what they were before, in articulating differences for which discontinuity is an important element.
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